Italo Calvino and The Italian Fables

1. Italo Calvino &
the Italian fables

3. • Italo Calvino was born
in Santiago de Las
Vegas, a suburb of
Havana, Cuba in 1923.
• His father, Mario, was a
tropical agronomist
and botanist
• Mario Calvino had
emigrated to Mexico in
1909 where he took up
an important position
with the Ministry of
Agriculture.

4. • In 1917, Mario left for Cuba to conduct
scientific experiments, after living through the
Mexican Revolution.
• Calvino's mother, Eva Mameli, was a botanist
and university professor.
• In 1925 the family returned to Italy and
settled permanently in San Remo on the
Ligurian coast.

5. • The family divided their time between the
Villa Meridiana, an experimental floriculture
station which also served as their home, and
Mario's ancestral land at San Giovanni
Battista.
• On this small working farm set in the hills
behind San Remo, Mario pioneered in the
cultivation of then exotic fruits such as
avocado and grapefruit.

7. • The vast forests and luxuriant fauna omnipresent
in Calvino's early fiction such as The Baron in the
Trees derives from this "legacy".
• He and his brother Floriano would climb the tree-
rich estate and perch for hours on the branches
reading their favorite adventure stories.
• A fan of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book as a
child, Calvino felt that his early interest in stories
made him the "black sheep" of a family that held
literature in less esteem than the sciences.

9. • Austere, anti-Fascist freethinkers, Eva and
Mario refused to give their sons any religious
education.
• Eva managed to delay her son's enrolment in
the Fascist armed scouts, the Balilla
Moschettieri, and then arranged that he be
excused, as a non-Catholic, from performing
devotional acts in church. But later on, as a
compulsory member, he could not avoid the
assemblies and parades of the
Avanguardisti, and was forced to participate in
the Italian occupation of the French Riviera in
June 1940.

11. • In 1941, Calvino dutifully enrolled at the
University of Turin, choosing the Agriculture
Faculty where his father had previously taught
courses in agronomy.
• Concealing his literary ambitions to please his
family, he passed four exams in his first year.
• Calvino transferred to the University of
Florence in 1943 and reluctantly passed three
more exams in agriculture.

12. • By the end of the
year, the Germans had
succeeded in
occupying Liguria and
setting up Benito
Mussolini's puppet
Republic of Salò in
northern Italy.
• Now twenty years
old, Calvino refused
military service and
went into hiding.

14. • In spring 1944, Eva encouraged her sons to
enter the Italian Resistance in the name of
"natural justice and family virtues".
• Calvino joined the Garibaldi Brigades, a
clandestine Communist group and, for twenty
months, endured the fighting in the Maritime
Alps until 1945 and the Liberation.

17. • Calvino settled in Turin in 1945, after a long
hesitation over living there or in Milan.
• Returning to university, he abandoned
Agriculture for the Arts Faculty.
• In 1947, he graduated with a Master's thesis
on Joseph Conrad.

18. His first novel, Il
sentiero dei nidi di
ragno (The Path to the
Nest of Spiders) written
with valuable editorial
advice from
Pavese, won the Premio
Riccione on publication
in 1947.

19. • With sales topping 5000 copies, a surprise
success in postwar Italy, the novel inaugurated
Calvino's neorealist period.
• In 1948, he interviewed one of his literary
idols, Ernest Hemingway, travelling with
Natalia Ginzburg to his home in Stresa.

20. Hemingway

21. Ultimo viene il corvo
(The Crow Comes Last),
a collection of stories
based on his wartime
experiences, was
published in 1949.
Despite the triumph,
Calvino grew
increasingly worried by
his inability to compose
a worthy second novel.

22. • He eventually became a consulting editor.
• In late 1951, presumably to advance in the
Communist Party, he spent two months in the
Soviet Union as correspondent for l'Unità.
• The articles and correspondence he produced
from this visit were published in
1952, winning the Saint-Vincent Prize for
journalism.

24. Over a seven-year period, Calvino wrote three
realist novels, The White Schooner (1947–1949),
Youth in Turin (1950–1951), and The Queen's
Necklace (1952–54)

25. "I began doing what came most naturally to me
– that is, following the memory of the things I
had loved best since childhood. Instead of
making myself write the book I ought to write,
the novel that was expected of me, I conjured
up the book I myself would have liked to read,
the sort by an unknown writer, from another
age and another country, discovered in an attic."

26. The result was Il visconte
dimezzato (1952; The
Cloven Viscount)
composed in 30 days
between July and
September 1951. The
protagonist, a
seventeenth century
viscount sundered in two
by a
cannonball, incarnated
Calvino's growing
political doubts and the
divisive turbulence of the
Cold War.

27. Skillfully interweaving elements of the fable and
the fantasy genres, the allegorical novel
launched him as a modern "fabulist".
In 1954, Giulio Einaudi commissioned his Fiabe
Italiane (1956; Italian Folktales) on the basis of
the question, "Is there an Italian equivalent of
the Brothers Grimm?”
For two years, Calvino collated tales found in
19th century collections across Italy then
translated 200 of the finest from various dialects
into Italian.

29. • In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet
invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian
Communist Party.
• Calvino began writing The Baron in the Trees.
Completed in three months and published in
1957, the fantasy is based on the "problem of
the intellectual’s political commitment at a
time of shattered illusions”.

31. • Calvino was allowed to visit the United States,
where he stayed six months from 1959 to
1960 (four of which he spent in New York),
after an invitation by the Ford Foundation.

32. • In 1962 Calvino met Argentinian translator
Esther Judith Singer ("Chichita") and married
her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which
he visited his birthplace and was introduced to
Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
• On 15 October 1967, a few days after
Guevara's death, Calvino wrote a tribute to
him that was published in Cuba in 1968, and
in Italy thirty years later.

33. In the fermenting atmosphere that evolved into
1968's cultural revolution (the French May), he
moved with his family to Paris in 1967, setting
up home in a villa in the Square de Châtillon.

34. Calvino had more intense contacts with the
academic world, with notable experiences at the
Sorbonne (with Barthes) and the University of
Urbino.

35. • In 1975 Calvino was made Honorary Member
of the American Academy.
• Awarded the Austrian State Prize for
European Literature in 1976, he visited
Mexico, Japan, and the United States where
he gave a series of lectures in several
American towns.

36. • During the summer of 1985, Calvino prepared
a series of lectures to be delivered at Harvard
University in the fall.
• On 6 September, he was admitted to the
ancient hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in
Siena, where he died during the night
between 18 and 19 September of a cerebral
hemorrhage.
• His lecture notes were published
posthumously in Italian in 1988 and in English
as Six Memos for the Next Millennium in 1993.